making HR better, one HR pro at a time

Tag Archives: Strategy

In case you weren’t aware, March 31st 2015 was cast as Vacation Commitment Day, brought to you by the Take Back Your Time nonprofit. The organization is devoted to helping workers across America focus on taking more of the vacation that they have available, because we are notorious for accruing, but not using, our leave.

This sounds like a great idea, but the timing is interesting.

This is an intriguing coincidence because just last week I was reading a new study from Accountemps about the top benefits employees are asking for in 2015. Want to know what topped the list?

More vacation time.

So what gives? We want more vacation time, but we also don’t use all of the time that we accrue.

According to a recent CareerBuilder survey, more than half of workers over age 60 plan to continue working in some capacity after retiring from their current career. I’ve read about the “graying of the workforce” and the impending “brain drain” for years, and it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the topic’s sheer magnitude. And while it might be your first instinct to think that the shift is toward part-time work, the population of individuals over 65 who are pursuing full-time work has been on the rise for years. Today I’d like to share a short anecdote to help illustrate how this can play out in the real world and to teach a lesson in retaining older workers.

The Risk of Employee Retirement

When I was working as an HR Director several years back, an employee called me and told me he planned to quit. When pressed, he admitted that he liked the job and his coworkers, but he wanted to spend time with his grandchildren and pursue some hobbies.

At the time, several things were running through my head simultaneously: Continue reading →

This week I’m hosting the Strategic HCM themed HR Carnival. For those of you that might be new, the HR Carnival is a series of links to blogs around the world that are gathered together for a single post. Sometimes there is a theme, and sometimes it’s wide open in terms of topics. I try to create themed carnival posts, because I like collecting content around a specific topic to allow you to go deep into one content area. As you might have guessed, this time we’re talking about strategic HRM (or strategic HR, whatever works for you). Here’s what I requested from the community in terms of content:

For this Carnival, I’m looking for posts around the theme of “How to be a strategic HR player in 2015”. In recent weeks I have spent a lot of time researching and writing about HR strategy, strategic planning, etc. I took the SPHR exam, which focuses heavily on strategic HRM. I think HR as a profession knows that this “strategy thing” is important, but they don’t know how to do it, where to start, etc. I’d love to hear some examples, simple ones, of how people actually put this stuff into practice. Or maybe just a tip or two on where to start for the newbies.

Make sense? Are you with me?

Good. Let’s jump into the submissions.

Strategic HRM Carnival of HR

David Richter from OctopusHR offers a great case study into how the HR team aligned training goals with the organizational strategy (with some excellent results). I really like this one, because case studies are excellent tools for learning about how other organizations face challenges. All too often we hear about business issues or successes independently, but a case study that highlights the issues and how the organization overcame them is especially powerful as a learning tool for the rest of us. Well done, David.

My friend and colleague Trish McFarlane posted on the Brandon Hall Group blog about her recent HCMx podcast with David Wentworth. During the episode they talk about the changing world of learning and development, but it really gets into strategic territory when they discuss how to link individual performance with organizational performance. That, my friends, is what aligning talent practices with organizational goals looks like. I encourage you to check it out!

Sandrine Bardot at Compensation Insider brings us a plan for how to get buy in for your compensation and benefits plan. This is an excellent post not only because Sandrine offers us an easy template for putting this into practice, but because she also gives us some critical advice for getting your stakeholders on board.

Dan McCarthy of Great Leadership by Dan shares excellence in written form as he discusses strategic alignment of leadership development programs. I’ll be honest–many organizations think that even having a leadership development initiative is enough to check off the “strategic HRM” box, but as Dan mentions in his article, it’s just the beginning. You have to continuously reassess to determine the strategic fit.

Amit Bhagria of Young HR Manager gives us his insights on strategic HR in 2015, and what I particularly liked was the initial review of the previous year’s high level changes to consider (mobile, social, economic, etc.) When teaching students to prepare for the SPHR, one of the keys I had to drill into them was the importance of evaluating the external environment in the strategic HRM planning process, and that’s where Amit starts in this post.

Jeanne Achille of Devon Group offers something simple, yet easy to miss. Often when we discuss strategy and how to “live it out,” we forget that a significant portion of the way we communicate is nonverbal (or “presence,” as Jeanne refers to it). Developing a strategy is only half the battle–if you can’t communicate it properly then you are going to ultimately fail.

Linda Brenner at Designs on Talent finally gets us to one of the most basic of strategic HR tenets: metrics. Measuring quality of hire (you have to check out her definition!) is a must if you want your talent acquisition practices to be strategic for the long term. If you’re not measuring, how will you know if you’re meeting your goals?

Winning the award of “strangest title” in this HR Carnival is a look at Aristotle’s beliefs on oysters by Tim Jones at Lumesse. The gist of the story is that for many years, people believed something that was completely false simply because they didn’t test the theory. This translates to the world of strategy in that we have to be looking for opportunities to test what we believe. This is something I plan to write on soon because it’s so critical and yet rarely done. Don’t assume that a new project will fail–test it. Don’t guess about someone’s reaction to a new policy–try a pilot program. Excellent reminder, Tim.

Allison at Meshworking provides insights into the power of using employee contributions to drive and enhance your engagement strategy. The point here that made me stop and think is that when HR discusses employee engagement, the initial suggestions are very tactical. However, incorporating an overall engagement strategy (or engagement culture, as I like to position it) that includes employees in the development process is a much more powerful strategic HRM move than one driven only from the corporate side.

Jennifer at Workforce Software gives us some strategy resolutions for the coming year. The specific item pertaining to strategic HRM I appreciated was this: total workforce management allows you to visualize your entire workforce, across all locations. And that insight empowers faster, more strategic—and more cost effective—decision making.

A big thank you goes out to all of the participants for sharing their knowledge and insights!

Early every year, the President of the United States makes an address to the nation. The purpose of the annual “State of the Union” address is to give an account of the year’s events and discuss the priorities of the coming months. If communicated properly, this is an opportunity to reach a larger audience, share major goals, and get buy-in from the constituency.

So why don’t we give it a shot?

I think every HR pro needs to have their own State of the Union address within their own company, department, or team (depending on the level of responsibility). This is strategic HR communication at its best, and it could become a valuable tool to allow leaders to peer into the inner workings of the HR strategy while allowing HR leaders to share key results areas as well. In fact, even compliance can be strategic, if communicated properly.

Here’s a quote from one study I found:

“Only 20 percent of [the largest publicly traded] companies discuss HR in their reports to shareholders. About one-quarter provides only limited references to the workforce, and some don’t mention their employees at all.”

Can you imagine how our stakeholders would react if we spent 30-50% of our budget on a resource and then never followed up about how it was being utilized? In effect, this is what’s happening with regard to our human capital investments.

How big is your “union?”

As I stated above, depending on where you are in your organization’s hierarchy, you might only be addressing your HR teammates. Or maybe you have the ability to snag an audience with your senior leadership team, and you’re willing to put together a short presentation for that group.

Whatever the case, the size and target audience will be different for everyone, but the tips below will still help you in defining what to discuss.

What to say

Okay, so I’ve sold you on the idea of delivering your own “state of HR” address, but what do you actually say? Here are a few ideas to consider based on the results of Brandon Hall Group’s Business Focus 2014: Leaders’ Top Priorities report:

Leadership strategy—Provide insights into the role the leadership strategy has played in supporting business growth

Sales strategy and planning—Offer data to demonstrate how HR supported the needs of the sales staff and leadership

These certainly aren’t the only topics you can cover, but this is a good starting point based on what organizational leaders need to hear.

The bottom line

This is your chance to get in front of a key audience (whether it’s the rest of your team or another influential group) and share your message about how HR’s priorities align with those of the business.

What are you waiting for?

Closing comments

Which stakeholders would benefit most from hearing this address from you or your HR leaders?

What are the key issues your leaders are facing that you can include in your address?

You’ve heard the talk about HR strategy and how it can make your organization better–now it’s time to live it. I want to help you make 2015 the best year yet in that respect, but I need a little help from you to make it happen.

I’m doing a little research on strategic HR, developing an HR strategy, and strategic HR planning, and I’d really appreciate if you would take this two-question survey to help me understand what you want to know more about so I can prepare to teach those topics.

HR is always a day late and a dollar short.
-Chris Powell, CEO BlackbookHR

That comment from Chris Powell has stuck with me since our initial conversation, and I think it’s a reality we all need to be aware of and try to mitigate. Think of it this way — when someone asks finance, sales, or operations about specific facts, figures, and projections, they can typically throw out a ballpark answer within moments.

But for some reason, HR has always taken the “let me get back to you on that” approach. And that, my friends, is not a winning strategy.

One of the things I was taught early in my HR career is to always have the trusty response of “let me get back to you” ready for when someone asks you a question you don’t know. Over time, I have seen the use of that grow until it’s used on an almost daily basis as a way for HR pros to get out of conversations they are not comfortable with (discussions of revenue, sales, productivity or other hard numbers).

We can’t let that be a crutch any more. It’s time to start learning the business, having some insights ready to go, and being able to share information as quickly as other organizational leaders.

For instance, if someone asks the VP of sales how his numbers are looking, he can (more often than not) immediately respond with a good approximation of the current status. Think for a moment about how that compares credibility-wise when someone asks HR a similar question and we say, “Um, I’ll have to check and let you know.”

I am testing out something new this week and have been publishing short, 1-2 minute videos on YouTube daily as a way to get some quick thoughts out there on a variety of topics. I’m rounding up this week’s content here. Let me know what you think about the topics, format, etc.

\Subscribers will need to click through to view the videos below)

HR: it’s not about finding a seat at the table, it’s about finding the food truck

Today we’re looking at how HR isn’t necessarily about finding a “seat at the table,” but it’s more like “finding the food truck.” It’s often a moving target and to be strategically relevant we need to put some effort into the process to make it work.
Credit to Chris Powell, CEO of BlackbookHR for the great quote!

Innovation, HR Conferences, and HRevolution

Talking about how to drive innovation and innovative thinking when the traditional training and conference events are created to help us continue doing things as they have always been done. In addition, events like HRevolution (http://thehrevolution.org) DO create those types of thinking.

Making the workplace better: micro and macro views

How can we make the workplace better? Some people look at a massive innovation across the board, while others seek out how to make one-on-one relationships better and build out from there. Good discussion.